October 31st is Halloween, the evening or the e'en, of All Hallows' Day.  All Hallows, all holy ones, is the same as All Saints day.  It has its origins in pre-Christian Autumn festivals principally designed to mark the beginning of the cold dark months, the need for lanterns and fires and the eating of root vegetables.  Just like many pre-Christian festivals it was absorbed, or carried on, and became Christianised.  The 'custom of observing saints days by the eve, usually with the first evensong of whatever saint's day it is, comes straight out of the Book Genesis where the first verses have the refrain, 'and the evening and the morning were the first day, and the evening and the morning were the second day,' and so on.  That is why the Jewish Sabbath begins at sunset on the eve, it is the evening and the morning of the creation story.  'If it was good enough for God,' so the reasoning goes, 'it is good enough for us.'  So, whatever people may or may not be conscious of doing as they make turnip or pumpkin lanterns and wear silly hats, they are in fact observing a festival which carries two great traditions of Christian faith, the tradition of continuity with the Jewish roots that were Jesus' own roots and observances, and the continuity of the Church as it celebrated the saints as a whole.

November 1st is All Saints' Day.  It is, or it should be, one of the greatest days of the Christian calendar.  The reason All Saints' Day is so important is two fold.  First it is a sort of bulk festival when we remember everyone who has served God with especial quality, 'a great multitude that no one could number.'  Second, All Saints' Day is profoundly encouraging.  It is about all the nameless saints whom God knows but whom we never know about.  It is about the quiet saints who unspectacularly, modestly, humbly, privately served the gospel by their sheer goodness.  God knows them, we may not, but it matters that we celebrate God's happiness in their hidden witness just as much as we celebrate the noisy, spectacular and more public saints.  It is encouraging therefore in this way, that we discover we are all called to be saints.
 

November 2nd is All Souls' Day.  This is another sweeping-up festival.  It sweeps up everyone who has been baptised and who thereafter has faithfully practiced the Christian faith through worship, love and service.  It is about our faith in God's astonishing capacity to love the whole of creation from the big bang to world without-end, the whole blooming lot.  It's about us, you and me as part of that incredible celebration of life.  It's about all those marvellous, magnificent, majestic, millions of faithful Christian people who have lived lives of love and prayer and goodness.  It's about our linked lives, one huge community of love stretching right back through the great Christian centuries of the past, our real family; 'a great cloud of witnesses.'  Some people say that when we die, that's it, God judges and we can't pray for those who have died.  To that I would say simply read all about the resurrection appearances of Jesus in the gospels after the first Easter Day.  Jesus did not stop loving the disciples and they did not stop loving him, but they knew, they could see, the quality of his life was different.  So we, like them, do not stop loving those whom we loved while they were with us and we rightly continue to love and to pray for them still, to tell God how much they matter to us and we love them in their greater eternal life.  If we believe in the resurrection and life eternal it seems to me that we must pray for the souls of the faithful Christian departed, we are obliged to care for those who have died because they are still part of the greater life that is God's amazing creation that we barely glimpse.

So, may the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God, rest in peace and rise in glory.

FATHER DAVID